There is an attribute to the ODBC driver called 'LongReadLen'. My experience with Windows NT 4.0 and SQL Server 6.5 is that you must set LongReadLen to the size of the buffer that you need to read the column data into, otherwise you will only get 80 characters.
If you have a handle to a database connection called $dbh, you should be able to do:
$dbh->{'LongReadLen'} = 500; # if length of data to be read is 500
I would do this before I issued the $dbh->prepare() with the embedded SQL statement.
BTW, if you search on PerlMonks or Google for the word "LongReadLen", you should find plenty of more complete examples. The PerlMonks search engine isn't working for me at the moment.
Dave Aiello
Chatham Township Data Corporation
